Eva Braun was born within weeks of the author's German mother, but how did the same set of cultural and social influences produce one of the most tarnished-by-association characters ever? The question makes Angela Lambert's fascinating biography more personal than the average portrait of a key figure of Nazi Germany, but also ensures that the true Braun is exhaustively sought in the surprisingly scant evidence (as soon as her 13-year relationship with Hitler began, Braun was kept invisible from the public). Though anxious not to humanise Hitler, Lambert is keen to rationalise how anyone could love him, considering what he was up to and the fact he offered little emotional or sexual return. Lambert convincingly defends an apparently pleasant woman against the wrath of history.

As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela, by Mark Thomas. Ebury Press £7.99

As a leading firebrand comedian, Mark Thomas isn't afraid of getting his hands dirty when there's political connivance to expose. In the course of this thorough smack-down of the British government's acquiescence to the arms trade, Thomas D-locks himself by the neck to a bus full of arms dealers at a trade fair; gets a group of convent schoolgirls to buy instruments of torture, to show how easy it is; and brokers arms deals with a Zimbabwean general. But Thomas is not just the master of the eyecatching stunt: his investigations even led to him presenting evidence on the Hinduja brothers to a parliamentary select committee. His self-deprecating humour laces a blistering criticism of the network of government fibs and gaping legal loopholes facilitating horrific acts.

Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, by Ruth Scurr. Vintage £8.99

He was a plain, provincial lawyer, staunchly opposed to the death penalty, yet somehow he became one of the bloodiest and most despotic figures of the French Revolution. Less magnetic than many of his fellow revolutionaries, Robespierre was uncommonly singleminded, espousing the mutual inclusivity of virtue and terror and rather contrarily sending thousands to the guillotine lest they stand in the way of his vision of democracy. But Robespierre is often a surprisingly featureless character, lost somewhere between his detractors and the flattering distortions of his defenders. Ruth Scurr makes a partial but persuasive attempt at revising him, sometimes thwarted by his elusive personality and lack of personal attachments, but nevertheless creating an engrossing account of the chaos of the Terror.

The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, by Gavin Stamp. Profile Books £8.99

As part of Profile Books's Wonders of the World series on iconic monuments or places, the Thiepval Arch initially seems an unlikely fellow of the Alhambra or Stonehenge, and is certainly lower down on the daytrips list. But Gavin Stamp's fascinating book is an indispensable reminder of Edwin Lutyens's 150ft memorial to the 'Missing of the Somme'. In the campaign between July and November 1916, the British army suffered 419,000 casualties, more than 73,000 of whom could not be found or identified afterwards. Their names are inscribed on the pyramid-shaped complex of arches at Thiepval, northern France, and the megalithic yet airy structure dominates the surroundings, which were devastated in the First World War and remain saturated in melancholy today.